First, the news

Went to see Doctor Caswell this AM.

Not a lot to talk about now that my a1c’s are good. We did discuss my sleep apnea, and I amazed myself with my uncharacteristic presence of mind by asking if there were CPAP masks that only go in the nose, like the cannula setup I was using to get oxygen when I was in the hospital last week.

The answer is yes. And that’s super important because I was able to get used to the cannula pretty much right away, and that opens u the possibility that I could get used to it for CPAP as well and maybe actually kick my OTHER major health issue, sleep apnea, to the curb.

Then I would just have whatever the frick is happening to my muscles to worry about.

Heh. Imagine that.

Oh, and I learned that my attacks of demon hunger might be the fault of one of my daily drugs, glicazide, and she might start scaling that one back if I continue to have stable and correct blood sugar under Jadiance.

Now, on with the introspection.

Open or closed?

Ain’t that the eternal question?

Leaving my room just now, Julian asked, “Door : open or closed?”, and I had that thought.

I am doing what I can to open up inside. I know that I have been far too closed off in my cold stone fortress, to the point where I could barely breathe let alone live, and in order to heal I am going to need to let the sun shine in.

But like I keep saying, that means letting everything else in, too. And that means having to get used to that big bad noisy world out there.

Even if that only means expanding my horizons in here, on the Internet, sitting here at my computer. nowhere near the “real world”.

Because my Internet world is quite small. I deal with the same group of fuzzies, more or less,. every day, and I almost never meet new people. I spend my non-fuzzy time either playing (single player) video games or watching YouTube videos while messing about with AI image generation, and those are solo activities too.

So here I sit with the vastness of humanity at my fingertips, all in a safely mediated by my screen form, and I still remain cloistered in my sad, cold little world.

I guess that deep down, I still feel like it’s not safe for me to try to go play with the other kiddies. To that part of me, “stranger” is just another word for “threat” and that makes me hide like a war criminal from almost everybody.

Well, deeper self, no rush, and nobody is going to drag you into the light against your will, but you should know that it’s safe to come out and play now. You’re a big strong adult now and can easily handle any verbal bullies you encounter, and you know that the sorts of crazy thoughts that go through your head when you’re in a social panic don’t matter because they don’t represent the reality of what people are seeing or thinking at all, and you know that you’re actually quite lovely and pleasant to have around, and so there is no reason you can’t just go out there and be yourself just like everyone else.

Only smarter. And cuter.

More after the break.

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Tales from the Hospital : The Failed IV

So, late one night in the hospital, a nurse came by to give me my next antibiotic IV and noticed that my IV port had shifted and was no longer working, and needed to be replaced.

I was mildly surprised at this, as when I have been on the outpatient IV antibiotics program at RGH, I’ve had an IV port last more than a week, and that’s with me moving around and doing things like I normally do.

But oh well, she’s the nurse and I’m just the hunk of sickly meat in her care.

She preps my left arm and I immediately know I am in trouble because she looks very nervous. Oh lovely.

I warn her that I have the kinds of veins that are very hard to find, and she just smiles at me fixedly and assures me there won’t be be a problem.

I guess I can’t blame her. Who wants to go scuttling off to a superior without even trying?

My apprehension increases as she chooses a seemingly random place on my left forearm and off we go.

Now I will try to be circumspect but the following is still going to be somewhat harrowing so consider this a trigger warning for the medically sensitive.

In goes the needle and she begins hunting for the vein. Just digging around in there.

I have had these kinds of veins my whole life, and I hate it when the nurse starts hunting. The hunt is almost never successful and I just end up with a lot of pain.

No vein. All pain. Ha ha ha.

See, my veins are as devious and elusive as I am. Not only are they very hard to see, they actually have some kind of tough protective layer around them that causes them to squirm out of the way when someone tries to puncture them.

So she is digging around in there and I am being very patient with her. But as she digs around she is pressing in deeper and deeper.

Then it happens : she goes through the venous canal and into my fucking flesh.

I yell. But I am still being patient. I know I am a special challenge even to the seasoned nurses and she’s clearly new.

I suggest she give the other arm a try. But history repeats itself there, too. Once more, the needle pierces my actual living fucking flesh.

And this time I get pissed. My patience is gone and I yell at her that she is DONE, that she is not going to touch me again, and that she needs to go get someone else.

And you know what? I’m proud of that. For once in my life, I got angry at the right time and for the right reason. I had been a very patient patient up until that point, but I was not going to give her a third chance to impale me.

And yes, I am sure I traumatized the already nervous girl. But Jesus. I had cause.

She went and got a senior nurse, a good looking dude in his mid thirties, and together they were able to get the job done.

And he had a tricky time with it too, which I hope made her feel a little better.

But her feelings are not my primary responsibility. My own welfare is, and I feel good about not being a passive pussy about it and actually standing up for myself with emotion.

That’s the most important part : that it was real anger rising to combat a threat and not me just feebly protesting like, “Um, please, could you maybe try not to gouge my flesh?”

It was emotion under extreme circumstances, but it’s still a good start towards actually developing a full and healthy suite of emotional responses.

And not being such a god damned cold fish.

I am not sushi!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I tried to get my blog back, but reality defeated me.

Earlier today, I suddenly remembered that I had the password to my FatCow (web host) account in my notes!

D’oh! Problem solved, right?

Nope! Said password did not work. And I have tried to get their “forgot password” system to work at least a half dozen times but the password reset email never shows up.

Which means I will have to resort to the nuclear option : calling their 1-800 number.

Patient readers know that I have a problematic relationship with the phone. My social anxiety makes placing phone calls difficult for me sometimes, and so I will have to build up to making that dang call for a while.

I hate being like this. I deserve so much better than this mishegoss.

Still, I will wrestle back control of my blog soon., although my domain may be lost forever. There is a squatter at michaeljohnbertrand.com right now, though I can’t imagine why anyone would want my incredibly low traffic domain.

The squatter site might just be the default site of whoever I bought my domain from last year, though, and hence once I figure out who they are and pay them, I might get it back.

Meh. Either way, I will survive, even if I have to go to mjbertrand.com or somesuch.

The most important part is not the domain but the actual contents of my blog. I have 12 years of blog entries entrusted to FatCow, and if I lost those, I would be devastated.

So bear with me, FatCow. I will figure this all out soon.

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Not that blogging into a LibreOffice document is all that bad. The default font for the program (RobotoArialSansSerif) is a lot easier on the eyes than whatever I’ve been using in WordPress, and I can see my wordcount any time I want because it is always displayed right down there on the lower left of my screen.

In Wordpress, I have to press a button to get it. How crude.

In fact, if it wasn’t for the small fact that absolutely nobody can read what I write when I write this way, I would actually prefer it.

But I must reach my readers. Both of them.

Felicity (love you dear) helpfully suggested that I blog to my ancient Livejournal until I get this mess sorted out.

It could work, assuming that the dang thing is there after all these years. More to the point, there are tons of blog hosting possibilities out there.

In fact, it’s absurd that I pour these words into a privately hosted blog in the first place. Turns out I am avoidant even in my blogging because I instinctively set things up way way back in 2011 in the most isolated and obscure (and expensive) way possible.

Any other way of doing it would have made me part of a blogging community, like Tumblr, and I might have actually attracted an audience there.

Which would be nice.

Ergo, when I get my FatCow back, I will first back the whole dang thing up to my hard driver and then see about migrating it to Tumblr or such.

Time to go play with the other kids now.

More after the break.

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One more time

Let’s take another crack at this fear of time thing. I got sidetracked yesterday.

How unlike me.

So why do I feel panic when I note the passage of time? Well, there is only one real deadline approaching me and that’s the big one : death.

I think that, deep down, I know my days are numbered and the number isn’t very high, and so when I notice, say, that “it’s the end of the month already?!?” or somesuch, it makes me feel like I am even closer to the grave than I thought.

Which, tragically, does NOT galvanize me into action and set of a frenzy of activity as I try to pack a lifetime of living into my last remaining days.

I am nowhere near strong enough for that. That kind of thing is for the living. not for us half-dead dreamers wandering in the fog.

Instead it’s merely yet another thing that makes me pull my turtle head deep into my shell and ignore cruel reality all the more.

It’s my number one go to move.

It’s my only move.

This makes looking to my future in any meaningful way impossible. Like I said before, I can dream all the dreamy little dreams of functionality I want as long as they never, ever try to get me to actual do or change anything.

If they do, the deep freeze descends like an overly aggressive fire suppression system and kills that dream while it’s still embryonic.

It’s that god damned sprinkler system that is the real enemy. But I sense that, like the walls of this cold stone fortress of mine, what seems like it confines me really protects me from that big bad world out there.

After all, in order to do things, ya kinda have to go out there. You have to leave the comfortable misery of this sad little life of mine and actually go out into the world where it is bright and loud and complicated and you don’t control anything and so you are vulnerable, so very very vulnerable, to all those bad things out there.

It’s hard to convince one’s deeper self that it is worth it. That there is enough to gain out there to make up for all that chaos and risk. That the world outside the shell can be a happy place where we can not only survive but thrive.

I don’t have a word for whatever is broken in us failure to launch types that makes that so hard for us to believe. But something has gone deeply and drastically wrong with us and it leaves us crippled souls unable to grow up at all.

I got sidetracked again, didn’t I?

Oh well, it will all come out in time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

On being frail

Just got back from the kitchen. Quick trip, just went there to grab a can of beverage and a piece of fruit.

Now I am sitting here heaving and panting like I took a job around the block, and wondering where the fuck my life is at.

Part of that is hating my past self for sitting around on his ass all day playing video games and stuffing his face with junk food and not taking his diabetes seriously at all.

Which is understandable. I imagine we all wish we had been better people in the past. But the past has passed, and nothing we can do can change it.

All we can do is something much harder : try to be the person today that we will wish we had been.

Anyhow, just feeling glum about how fragile I am, I suppose. It’s kind of hard for me to build up any kind of confidence in my ability to handle reality when it hurts to move.

Well, it hurts to walk, anyhow. Thank God (knock on wood) I can still do what I do best : sit on my ass and play video games.

But I gave up the junk food and cut way back on carbs and thanks to Jardiance, my blood sugar is under control, and my suite of blood pressure meds has my blood pressure under control.

So statistically, I am actually a lot healthier than I used to be.

Too bad the damage is already done.

Speaking of meds, watched a fascinating video about how grapefruit has a chemical in it that interferes with the enzymes in your gut that usually block about half of any drug’s effect.

This is a problem because drugs are designed with that enzyme’s effect in mind, meaning that a glass of grapefruit juice could make your next dose of a med twice as potent, effectively double the dosage.

And there I was, with empty cans of grapefruit soda (made with real grapefruit!) next to me wondering what in the hell I have been doing to myself.

So I immediately looked up what drugs have been proven to be prone to this citrus based interference. I found a list, and scanned it, and I thought I was out of the woods at first.

But there, near the bottom of the list, was a pill I take every day : clopidogrel. Damn it.

Luckily, all grapefruit does is maybe make it less effective. Which is still bad – that shit is protecting me from getting a stroke-inducing blood clot after all – but it’s still way better then finding out it makes it toxic, or radioactive, or soaked in the blood of Satan.

I wouldn’t put anything past Big Pharma these days.

Ergo, the next time I am ordering canned beverages, I will have to leave the diet grapefruit soda off the list and replace it with diet something else.

Ginger ale, maybe? We’ll see.

But they’ll have to pry my diet fizzy lemonade out of my cold, dead hands!

More after the break.

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Afraid of time

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I’m tempted to call it “temporophobia” but I am pretty sure that would mean something else.

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Just as I was finishing today’s Part 1, I realized I am afraid of time.

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What I mean by that is, when I look at the calendar and see that it’s later in the month than the last time I looked by more than a day, I panic.

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I am actively distressed to find that I have slipped even further into the future. It’s as though there is some kind of deadline approaching and I haven’t even started the assignment yet.

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But there’s no deadline. The reaction makes no sense on the face of it.

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Neither does my reaction, which is to further retreat into myself and pointedly ignore any and all thoughts about my future.

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This helps nobody.

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The healthfully inflected version of this would be to actively look forward to the future. To see it as an exciting and wonderful place to be.

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And I can imagine that, but only in the abstract, as an idea. As soon as I try to fill in the specifics, it all falls apart in my head.

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I can dream. Wouldn’t it be nice if… say, I got a writing gig that paid the bills. And I can dream about how much better my life would be if…

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But the moment I try to imagine a path to that goal, it all falls apart again. Once it becomes a matter of requiring personal change, I freeze up, and it goes nowhere.

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It’s like my depression and the rest of the diseased part of my mind will let me dream my big dreamy dreams as long as it keeps me distracted and docile, but the moment I start actually contemplating revolution, the secret police crack down on me hard.

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Depression is a fascist state. Or at least mine is.

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But the deep dark dirty truth is that this cold stone prison of mine protects me as it confines me. It keeps me from having to deal with the big bad crazy world outside its walls. It saves me from all that chaos and overstimulation and overwhelm waiting for me out there.

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It keeps me from having to grow the fuck up already.

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And that’s the worst thing about it, in the end. Not that it’s a prison but that it’s a crutch. I front like I am a prisoner in this icy tomb but the truth is, that door ain’t locked. Nobody is forcing me to stay in here. I can walk out into the sunlit world any time I want.

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But I don’t want too. I’m far too scared. Something went terribly wrong in us failure to launch types that makes us certain that the real world will destroy us utterly.

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And that’s not wrong. If we go out there, “we”, the childlike adult us who is scared of everything, will die. We will be forced to become whatever is next.

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The caterpillar will die. But the butterfly will live. And even though we will have changed into something radically different from what we are now, we will still be us. We will still be alive. We will remain the same person we have always been, just in a new form.

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After all, once I was a tiny child. Now I’m a fully grown man. I could not be more different than what I once was. But I am still that same person. I never died. I only changed.

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Guess it’s high time I stop fighting it and go ahead and pupate.

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I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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I’ve always said that there was only one thing that would keep me from blogging to you wonderful people every day, and that thing happened : I was in the hospital.

Erf. Even thinking about it makes me feel like I am getting sick again.

When last I wrote to you lovely folks, it was last Sunday night, New Year’s Eve 2023, and I was feeling very ill and wondering if I was going to make it to Denny’s with Le Gang.

Nope. I did not make it. It was not to be.

Which really sucked because that’s when we were going to do our little Christmas gift exchange. The timing had been wrong for doing it the week before because that was, of course, Christmas Eve, and so everyone had plans to be with their family except for lil ol me, leaving me alone to mind the store.

Hey you. Store. Mind me. Or else. Grr.

Back to New Year’s Eve. I just kept feeling worse and worse. Chest pains, muscle aches and stiffness all through my body, headache, troubled breathing, dizziness, weakness, and nausea.

You know. The usual gang. Except for the breathing part. That was new.

Not one of the regular players. A seasonal co-star at best.

What decided me on not being able to do Denny’s was, as part of getting ready to go there I had to get up and get a pair of socks, and during that trip I fell twice (thank you, king sized bed, for saving my ass again when the stiffness in my muscles tripped me up) and when I sat back down, my lungs were heaving, I was sweating profusely, my heart was pounding like a bass drum, and I felt like throwing up.

From crossing the room and back. Uh oh. Not good. No way was I going to be able to make it down to the car and into Denny’s and back.

After Joe and Julian had left for Denny’s, I was left sitting here in front of Mister Computer contemplating my options. I added up all the ways I felt bad and finally came to the conclusion that this shit ain’t normal and it was 911 time.

Could have saved the taxpayers some money if I had decided that before J&J left. But I get the feeling that I needed to know Denny’s was going to happen without me first.

I’m weird that way. That, and like millions of other ways.

Anyhoo, I called 911, and before long the paramedics show up, and start doing their thing, taking my vitals and asking me questions and such.

And that’s when the story becomes very “me”, because of course I start cracking jokes and making them laugh like I was at an open mic night.

And brother, I was killing it. I was slaying them. I worked that room like a pro and it felt damned good. One of the paramedics even told me I was a hilariously funny guy.

SCORE. Man, do I need to get back to being a comedian. I’m a natural at it.

And more importantly, on a personal level, was that I had gotten along and made a favourable impression on a group of perfectly ordinary people.

They liked me. They really liked me. And in the bizarre calculus of my social dysfunction, that meant the world and several asteroids to me.

I had managed to not just keep them laughing but actually feel relaxed and good with them, and in my own odd way, i connected with them on a human level.

Just knowing that I can do that now makes me feel so much better about life.

It also made me realize that most of the time, I have been afraid of ordinary people. I guess all I saw in them was a chance to be paralysed by social awkwardness and anxiety and that terrible feeling of abandonment and isolation I feel when I try to reach out to people and totally fail to connect.

But now I know that other things are possible. I can be around ordinary people and not only get along with them, I can make them happy. I can make them like me.

And all through the power of comedy. And being really, really good at it.

More after the break.

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Life fucking hates me

To the tune of $250.

Something went wrong during the registration process for my new Post Office brand prepaid credit card, and now I can’t use it without an access code it is sending to an email address that does not exist, and there doesn’t seem to be a way for me to fix it.

Which means whoever is running this credit card thing has $250 of my money I can never use.

I am not defeated yet. I will figure something out. These fuckers are going to pay, one way or another.

But good God is life fucking me over lately. First with not being able to blog due to ANOTHER website sending confirmation codes that never get to me, then not being able to order stuff via Skip the Dishes, and now this crowning clusterfuck.

All this after coming home from being in the hospital for pneumonia.

I mean, what the flaming fuck, 2024? What did I ever do to you?

Needless to say, I feel very put-upon. Life is really testing my patience and resilience. All I wanted to do was come home and resume my life after four days in Richmond Hospital, and instead I get beset with troubles both vexing and bizarre.

It’s getting to the point where I feel pissed off and paranoid all the time. I can’t just relax and enjoy myself doing anything, even playing a video game, because in the back of my mind I am still silently fuming over my fate.

Oh, one more thing : tried to order my dream CPU last night.

Surprise! A wild import fee appears! It attacks and hits you for $120!

And I have only given Joe $300 on deposit and the order is now going to come out to a total of around $450 CDN so, no CPU for me this month.

I don’t have another $150 to give him, especially with $250 being held hostage by that credit card. If it wasn’t for that, I might be able to swing it.

But even if I get the card working, I can’t just pay Joe $150 with it, as far as I know.

Maybe I can use it to deposit money on my Amazon America account. I dunno.

To sum up : I am one pissed off customer. And I just want my goddamned life back.

I will talk you nice people again tomorrow.